Zainub Verjee | Ali Ahadi + Babak Golkar | Mohammad Salemy

Saturday, April 29, 1:00 PM  

Griffin Art Projects is thrilled to present the Alibaba Conundrum Keynote & Panel Discussion. 

This online event begins with the Keynote Presentation, I think, therefore I speak with distinguished programmer, curator, critic, writer and arts administrator, Zainub Verjee, followed by a panel discussion with Ali Ahadi + Babak Golkar–the artists behind Alibaba Conundrum–and independent artist, critic and curator Mohammad Salemy who will be joined by Dr Verjee. 

This event will conclude with a discussion and Q+A.

Panel Schedule:

Welcome & Introductions

Keynote with Dr. Zainub Verjee

Presentation by Alibaba Conundrum 

Presentation by Mohammad Salemy

Discussion and Audience Q&A

KEYNOTE PANELIST

Zainub Verjee, born in Kenya and educated in the UK, arrived in Canada in the early 1970s and studied business administration and economics at Simon Fraser University. She is a programmer/curator, critic, writer, and arts administrator. Embedded in a fluxus ethos, in her practice as a multidisciplinary artist, she uses language, labour, video, sound, textile and food as her materiality.

Deeply engaged with the UK’s British Black Arts, Third Cinema and the post-Bandung decolonization, and the history of women’s labour in British Columbia, Zainub co-founded the critically acclaimed In Visible Colours: An International Film/Video Festival & Symposium for Third World Women and Women of Colour (1989) and later led the Western Front as the Executive Director through the 1990s. She then moved to Ontario to work with the Canada Council for the Arts, the Arts Policy branch at the Department of Canadian Heritage, and later as the inaugural Director of the Culture Division at the City of Mississauga.

Her artworks have been shown at the Venice Biennale, Museum of Modern Art, NY, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland US, Asian Triennial Manchester,  Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie, France, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, México, D. F. (Mexico City, Mexico), Art Gallery of Alberta, Embassy Culture House (London, ON), and resides in private and public collections (Vancouver Art Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and others). 

A celebrated public intellectual, Zainub is also well known as an advocate for pursuit of art as a public good. She is a proponent of the value and centrality of art in society and broad education in the liberal arts and sciences. 

A Senior Fellow of Massey College and a McLaughlin College Fellow, Zainub is the laureate of 2020 Governor General’s Visual and Media Arts Award for Outstanding Contribution. Among many awards and honours, in recognition of her work, Simon Fraser University (Burnaby), OCAD University (Toronto) and NSCAD University (Halifax) have conferred honorary doctorates on her.

Mohammad Salemy is an independent Berlin-based artist, critic and curator from Canada. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and an MA in Critical Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia. He has shown his works in Ashkal Alwan's Home Works 7 (Beirut, 2015), Witte de With (Rotterdam, 2015) and Robot Love (Eindhoven, 2018). His writings have been published in e-flux, Flash Art, Third Rail, Brooklyn Rail, Ocula, Arts of the Working Class and Spike. Salemy's curatorial experiment ‘For Machine Use Only’ was included in the 11th edition of Gwangju Biennale (2016). Together with a changing cast, he forms the artist collective Alphabet Collection. Salemy is the Organizer at The New Centre for Research & Practice. He has been the cofounding Organizer of The New Centre since 2014.

Ali Ahadi (b. 1984, Tehran) is a Vancouver-based artist and a scholar in humanities. His interdisciplinary practice spans from site-specific ephemeral installations to sculpture, photo and video-based works, writing and translation. Ahadi’s work is constituted through addressing the problems of presentation and representation, monsteration and demonstration, and the relationships between aesthetics and contingent forms of abstractions. His proposed protocol of abstraction calls for what he terms a “monster”, an assemblage of a disorganized relations between the linguistic economy and the optical economy of an object.

Ahadi is an internationally exhibited artist. His last solo exhibition, Shit Yes Academy (Goh Ballet Academy) was held at the Ag Galerie (Tehran). He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on continental philosophy from the University of British Columbia. He currently teaches in the UBC’s Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, where he previously received his MFA in visual arts in 2012. Ahadi’s doctoral research devises two new models for a critical approach to historical and contemporary issues in art, politics, and philosophy. These models are “Thought-Activism” and the “Visitor”.

Babak Golkar (b. 1977, Berkeley) is an artist working and living in Vancouver. Grounded in deconstruction, replication and transformation, Golkar’s working process is manifested in an array of media and object forms. His research emerges from his interest in the relationship between space and human conditions in the contemporary world, and aims to both examine and upend established ways of looking. By distorting the assumed certainties of perspective, Golkar questions accepted cultural and socio-economic systems and ideological viewpoints—as well as their persistence over time. He holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr Institute (2003) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2006). 

Golkar’s has exhibited and presented works in national and international institutions, including: Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver); Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver); West Vancouver Museum (West Vancouver) Aga Khan Museum (Toronto); Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal (Montreal); Sabrina Amrani Gallery (Madrid); Museum Villa Stvck (Munich); Framer Framed (Amsterdam); Sazmanab (Tehran); Sharjah Contemporary Art Museum (Sharjah); Fondation Boghossian - Villa Empain (Brussels); Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).
In 2022 Golkar was named the first international Jameel Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, U.K., where he has been conducting research on the museum’s collection.

Ali Ahadi and Babak Golkar co-founded the duo Alibaba Conundrum in 2021.